BOOK REVIEWS FROM A CURIOUS MIND: I read a lot. Books and the data/stories contained within them are my oldest friends. Working at the University of Houston allows me to use the M.D. Anderson Library. Awesome! My wife mentioned that I should write up short summaries/observations on the books I've been reading, since people might be interested in reading them, so I did. Comments are welcome.

RXTT's Top 10's

Friday, May 18, 2018

Lucretius, and the man who saved his work from oblivion, sparked our modern world

The Swerve: How the World Became
Modern – Stephen Greenblatt (2011)

The intellectual
progress of humanity is never smooth, and quite often fraught with violence,
pride in ignorance, and just plain old bad luck.Sometimes an artifact from long ago is
rediscovered, or translated, and then becomes a touchstone for a whole world of
new thoughts and ideas.This book is
about one such re-discovery.There are
few writings from antiquity that have shaped and informed the modern world we
all live in quite like the work On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura in its OG Latin form) by the Roman poet and
philosopher Lucretius. Stephen
Greenblatt does an amazing job of uncovering not only the history of Lucretius
himself and his seminal work, but also the history and life of the sometime Papal
Secretary, and lifelong lover of literature and antiquities, Poggio Bracciolini
who through his diligent exploration unearthed a 400 year old handmade copy of
Lucretius’ masterpiece and shared it with the world.

Lucretius did not create
the ideas espoused in his poem.He was a
Roman citizen at a time when the Empire was in decline, and many thinkers were
looking back to the golden age of Greek thought and ideas to try and gain some
sort of insight that would bring back the glory of Rome.Lucretius was interested in the work of a
specific Greek philosopher, Epicurus, who lived and created a school of
philosophy nearly 300 years earlier.This philosophy, known as Epicurianism, is central to the ideas of
Lucretius, and forms a base for him to explore the nature of reality, life, and
the universe at large.Democritus’ idea,
atomism, is that all matter in the universe is reducible to tiny non-reducible
parts called atoms, and that because of this all matter is similar across the
Universe.Epicurus started his
explorations at the age of 12 when his teachers could not explain to him the meaning
of chaos.He took the atomist idea and
ran with it, positing that everything, planets, stars, the Sun, us, etc., were
all a part of the natural order of things, and that the same principles that
govern life and change on Earth do so in the heavens.Because of this, he stated that pleasure,
derived without hurting anyone or anything else, is the highest goal of
life.Epicurus denied the immortality of
the soul, seeing it as just another part of the living organism, which
dissipates at the time of death.There
is no afterlife, and yet one should not fear death.“Death is nothing to us, for that which is
dissolved I without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”

Consider this, using
pure thought and reason, and before any scientific method of empirical
experimentation was even conceived of, Lucretius had taken the starting point
of Epicurus’ philosophy, and intuited some deep truths that, to modern,
post-Enlightenment minds, come off like predictions of the advancements of
science in the past 2,000 years.As
listed in this book by Mr. Greenblatt, here are some of the elements of the
Lucretian challenge put forth in On the Order of Things, as stated by the author, Peter Greenblatt:

·Everything
is made of invisible particles (There are no non-natural forces or deities
creating existence)

·The
elementary particles of matter – “the seeds of things” – are eternal (Neither
destruction nor creation have the upper hand.Everything is in a constant state of change and mutation of form.The philosopher George Santayana called this
idea, “the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.”)

·The elementary particles are infinite in number but
limited in shape and size (Lucretius intuited that there is a hidden code of matter,
and a specific set of rules by which they combine into the substances of our existence.He could not have known about molecular
chemistry, or genetics, or any other such thing, but his reasoning told him it
had to be true.Amazing!)

·All
particles are in motion in an infinite void (Every high school science
student learns this as part of physics.Einstein understood this as well and it was the basis for his Special
Relativity.)

·The
universe has no creator or designer (There is no purpose or end-goal for the existence of
the universe, only ceaseless creation and destruction.This is a very similar concept to that of the
endless cycles of time in many Eastern religions)

·Everything
comes into being as a result of a “Swerve” (If particles all moved in one
straight line there would be no interactions between them.Lucretius stated that “at absolutely
unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight
course.”He was thinking of a minimally
slight adjustment, enough to cause an infinite variety of combinations.)

·The
“Swerve”: is the source of human free will (if all motion were one
pre-determined chain of events, there would be no room for free will, with
cause following cause for eternity.)

·Nature
ceaselessly experiments (There is no single moment of creation nor an end to
creation)

·The
universe was not created for or about humans (There were forms of life
before humans, which no longer exist, and there will be forms of life after
humans cease to exist.)

·Humans
are not unique (We are made of the same stuff as all other life and
non-life.We can find many life-forms
that share traits we consider human, such as compassion, altruism, regret, and
love.As Lucretius states, a calf
recognizes its mother cow just like a baby human recognizes her mother.)

·Human
society began not in a Gold Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive
battle for survival (Lucretius understood that life is harsh, and was
especially so to early humans who had no tools, no medicines, no social organization,
and no language.)

·The
soul dies (The human soul, or any other living thing’s soul, is as much a part of
the body as the eyes, and also dissipates upon death.)

·There
is no afterlife (the afterlife has been a consolation and a torment
to many humans.However, once it is
grasped that the soul dies alongside the body, one can grasp that there are no
posthumous punishments to worry about, nor any rewards to be expected.Life on this Earth is all we humans have.)

·Death
is nothing to us (Once the body and soul die, there will be neither
pleasure nor pain, longing nor fear.“You
will not care, because you will not exist.”)

·All
organized religions are superstitious delusions (Humans become
enslaved to their own dreams.They
experience sequences of misfortune and feel that they are being punished by
some deity.They feel awe and wonder while
gazing at the sky above and assign that beauty to some magical being that must
have created it, regardless of the natural explanations for such phenomena.

·Religions
are invariably cruel (They promise hope and love but their deep
underlying structure is cruelty.“The
quintessential element of religion – and the clearest manifestation of the
perversity that lies at its core – is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.”Lucretius was writing this nearly 60 years
before the currently prominent sacrifice myth began.He was aware of Hebraic myths such as Abraham
almost gutting Issac cuz some voice in his head told him to, and would have
understood the prominent display of images and statues of a bloody, murdered
son.)

·There
are no Angels, Demons, or ghosts (All are entirely unreal and best forgotten.)

·The
highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of
pain (Lucretius believed that there is no higher purpose than the facilitation
of the pursuit of happiness for oneself and one’s fellow creatures, and this
includes all living things.“All other
claims, such as service to the state, glorification of gods or a ruler, and the
arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice, are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent.”
as paraphrased by Mr. Greenblatt.)

·The
greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion (Lucretius
believed the principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire and
gnawing fear.Our ability to imagine the
infinite, whether infinite pain, infinite sorrow, or infinite joy, keeps us
from accepting or enjoying the finite pleasures, rising up from finite sorrows,
and controlling the desire for infinite joy.)

·Understanding
the nature of things generates deep wonder (For Lucretius, humans engage
in many poisonous beliefs that prevent us from enjoying the wonder of the world
around us, including the idea of an eternal soul that will be punished or
rewarded indefinitely.This keeps humans
from living in the now, and lets them accept the wrongs and horrors of life as
just a way-station into the next world.This is deep poison, and keeps us from doing our best to increase
happiness worldwide, and reduce pain worldwide.It is the source of much of the evil in the world)

For hundreds of years, Lucretius works were
forgotten, until the world changed and people started exploring the old Greek
masters again.Due to the inherent bias
in christian researchers, they praised any philosopher whose ideas seemed to
correlate to the tenets of christianity while excoriating or outright
destroying the works of any philosopher who held what they believed to be “pagan”
or non–christian ideas.Because of this,
Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius were consigned to the “pagan” pile, and
their ideas and works ridiculed outright as part of Catholic dogma. Ironically, it took a bibliophile like Poggio
Bracciolini to travel to remote monasteries to rediscover these old works.The masses in the intervening centuries had
become dumb as rocks and highly illiterate.The monk copyists in these secluded monasteries would copy old works,
many times purely by eye, as they could not actually read old Greek or
Latin.Poggio’s discovery of On the
Nature of Things, and his subsequent dissemination of the work, occurred before
the invention of the printing press.Once that was invented, copies of Lucretius spread far and wide,
influencing many of the thinkers, artists, and writers that led what is now
called the Renaissance.These same
writers went on to influence the Enlightenment, and through that, the modern
world we all share. This book
is a great treasure, and should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the
underpinnings of our world, and the many ways in which the enemies of free
thought and free ideas fight and kill to keep their lies alive in the minds and
hearts of the masses.We currently live
in a world where too many factions are seeking to distract humanity back into
religious factions of “US” versus “THEM.” If it is not one religion against another, it
is upper classes against the poor ones, citizens against immigrants, or
civilized people against uncivilized “animals.” Every one of these con-artists, and they are
ALL con-artists, seeks to force us to see the world in the manner they
prescribe, for their own ends.It is
such a joy to find heroes in the past that help me fight the near-endless waves
of stupidity and evil that seek to keep humanity under control.Those who fight ideas do so because they KNOW
these ideas shatter their bullshit lies. Long live the life of the mind.Lucretius was one bad mo-fo.

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